I am not convinced that our troops have been pushed to their breaking point, as you say in the editorial. On the contrary, the surge has worked, and we’re far from breaking, as organizations such as Vets for Freedom and Freedom’s Watch point out. The U.S. is winning the war in Iraq.

Recently, State Department officers in Iraq wanted to quit because they feared for their lives. Excuse me, but don’t all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines fear for their lives when under fire? If they quit, suck their thumb or crawl away from the enemy, they face court-martial as well as humiliation and disgust from fellow service members.

I’m all for “less guns and steel and more soft power,” but let’s put people in the State Department who belong in Iraq and are not whiners.

Thomas Patrick Folan

Stony Brook, N.Y.

STATISTICS PERSPECTIVE
Navy Times’ Web site ran an Associated Press version of a story by The New York Times that reported that 121 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have committed or been charged with killings since they returned to the U.S. [“Report: 121 vets charged in deaths after tours,” NavyTimes.com, Jan. 15].

The story should have been accompanied by the information that the percentage of crimes and accidents are actually less for service members returning home than for the U.S. population at large. Shame on you.

Capt. David Tuma (ret.)

Arlington, Va.

===============

N.Y. Post Jan.24,2008

January 24, 2008 — Thanks to Ralph Peters for setting the record straight on veterans (“The New ‘Lepers’,” PostOpinion, Jan. 18). I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that “the paper of record” would publish a story so full of lies, exaggeration and innuendo.

As a veteran of two wars, Vietnam and Iraq, I agree wholeheartedly with Peters’ position. Veterans, with the exception of a tiny minority, prove to be good citizens and helpful neighbors.

Thank you, New York Post, for publishing such a spirited rebuttal to the slanderous opinion appearing in The New York Times.

John Pummell
Alexandria, Va.

****
The Times was merely practicing the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech, or does the officer feel that should be dictated by his likes and kind?

Troy Deane
Strousdsburg, Pa.

****
I am a 21-year Army veteran who has never committed a felony.

I have served in combat in Somalia and Afghanistan, and I am trained to do unspeakably lethal things – at incredibly high speeds without hesitation or remorse – to the enemy.

To my friends, relatives, neighbors and other Americans I encounter every day, the greatest threat I pose is a dirty look if they cut me off in traffic.

Sorry to disappoint the Times, but I don’t even plan to burn down its offices for smearing my good name and reputation.

Chris Overbey
Denver

****

As a Navy Reservist who came back from Kuwait three months ago, I would like to pass on my thanks to Peters for putting into words what I feel.

Dan Sullivan, Sr.
Aurora, Ind.

****
That the Times should engage in such efforts is hardly a surprise. In fact, the Times’ efforts have a political motivation – to hurt President Bush.

The unstated premise of the Times’ piece is that the president’s “illegal and immoral” war has created these “murderous monsters,” and he has unleashed them against an unsuspecting public.

In the Times’ view, slandering veterans is a small price to pay to make this larger political point.

John M. Wilson
Brooklyn

****
Thank you, Peters. Combat veterans are in your debt for your eloquent stand against this new and powerful wave of election-driven anti-militarism.

There are no Ernie Pyles in Fallujah, but maybe we finally have found one at The Post.

Alan Ryan
Brooksville, Fla.

****

Though I love our troops as much as the next guy, I don’t share in Peters’ pride in their having committed “only” 121 murders since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given that military recruiters are supposed to weed out criminal types, it makes no sense to compare the murder rate among Iraqi vets to that of the general population when trying to measure the effects of combat.

Only by looking at the murder rate among military personnel who haven’t gone to war can we make a true comparison.

Michael Dowd
Brooklyn

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”
No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in The New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it:

“Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time:

[Continued from page 1 of 3]

“Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.
Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.
It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered:

“Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”

Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.

So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.

The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of “Nightline” to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of “Nightline” would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young. It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.
In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.
A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 per cent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore anti-war left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?
Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.

Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?

© Mark Steyn 2008

The Wacko-Vet Myth
Now echoed by the New York Times.
by John J. DiIulio Jr.

IN A PAGE-ONE STORY published Sunday, January 13, 2008, “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles,” the New York Times reported on homicides by veterans of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seven Times reporters contributed to the lengthy story, which was co-authored by Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez.
The Times “found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.” All but one case involved male veterans. They speculated that their research “most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings” were “reported publicly or in detail,” and because “it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges.”
The Times cited experts including Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who “used to run ‘rap groups’ for Vietnam veterans and fought to earn recognition for what became known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.” The story noted that numerous “studies on the problems of Vietnam veterans have established links between combat trauma and higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, gun ownership, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse–and criminality.” It also quoted criminologist Lawrence W. Sherman: “The real tragedy in these veterans’ cases is that, where PTSD is a factor, it is highly treatable. . . . And when
people are exposed to serious trauma and don’t get it treated, it is a
serious risk factor for violence.”True, but that is hardly news to the Veterans Administration (VA), or to the Times. On October 11, 2006, the Times ran a story by Scott Shane, “Data Suggests Vast Costs Loom in Disability Claims.” It reported that 567,000 veterans had been discharged to that point, 30,000 of whom had sought treatment at VA facilities for PTSD. In November 2006, the VA issued a fact sheet on services for returning combat veterans: “About one-third of these combat veterans who seek care from VA have a possible diagnosis of a mental disorder . . . including PTSD. . . . Since the war began, VA has activated dozens of new PTSD programs around the country to assist veterans in dealing with the emotional toll of combat. . . . Studies of PTSD patients in general have suggested as many as half may enjoy complete remission and the majority of the remainder will improve.”

In 2007, the VA expanded its “poly-trauma network sites” and clinics all across the country, but VA officials who testified in Congress all agreed that still more must be done. It will take not only more hard work but more money. A January 2007 John F. Kennedy School of Government research report by Harvard policy analyst Linda Bilmes projected that about half of the 749,932 veterans to be discharged through 2007 might sooner or later be “seeking care” for whatever conditions, and that the total cost of providing lifetime medical care to all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for all medical needs could be somewhere around half a trillion dollars.
Given that many veterans rebound successfully from their war experiences and some flourish as a result of them,” Sontag and Alvarez observe, “veterans groups have long deplored the attention paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life.” “Clearly,” they aver, “committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans, many of whom struggle in quieter ways.”
This “extreme manifestation” is indeed extremely rare. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and other veterans’ advocacy groups are absolutely correct that not merely “many” but the vast majority of veterans not only remain completely law-abiding but go on to lead stable and productive personal, professional, and civic lives. Assuming 121 homicide cases in relation to 749,932 total discharges through 2007, 99.98 percent of all discharged Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have not committed or been charged with homicide.
And assuming 121 cases and 749,932 total discharges, the homicide offending rate for the discharged veterans would be 16.1 per 100,000. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has demographic data aplenty on homicide offending rates. For instance, in 2005, for white males aged 18-24, the rate was about 20 per 100,000. The Times opined that 121 was the “minimum” number, even as it counted veterans charged but not convicted with veterans tried and found guilty. Doubling the number to 242 would double the rate to 32.2 per 100,000.
Such crude but contextualizing calculations aside, the right question to ask is whether the veterans, other things being equal (controlling for age, race, gender,
education,
income, prior criminal history, and other variables), offend at rates that are significantly different from otherwise comparable groups (including groups that have an extreme PTSD incidence). Without doing the relevant statistical (multiple-regression) analyses with all the requisite empirical data, it is impossible to say.
In April 2007, BJS issued a detailed report showing that veterans were half as likely as non-veterans to be in prison, but that was explained mainly by the fact that two-thirds of male veterans in the population at large were aged 55 or older (older people are less likely to be found behind bars). The incarcerated veterans were somewhat more likely than incarcerated non-veterans to have committed violent crimes, and far more likely to have committed violent crimes against females or minors. There is, however, no evidence at all that ex-military personnel, including veterans who served in combat theatres and saw action, figure significantly or disproportionately in murder, rape, robbery, burglary, or property crimes.
The “Deadly Echoes” story spotlighted an important issue and sensitively profiled several tragic incidents. In many respects it was a model piece of journalism. But, in such a lengthy report, the Times should have done more to put its 121 cases against a broader data backdrop or two, been clearer about what nobody really knows about the subject, and taken much greater care than it did to avoid echoing what the VFW, in a 2006 story referenced by the reporters, rightly rejected as the “wacko-vet” myth.

John J. DiIulio Jr. is a contributing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD

The Times and its reporters are heavily invested in defeat. With plummeting stock prices and dismal subscription rates, they will spew anything to get attention.

Thank you, Peters, for your honesty and support of our troops.

Adam Damino
Mount Vernon

Peters’ article is very good, but you’re just scratching the surface.
Have you noticed that every major TV-crime show has run at least one episode in which the villains are in the military or are ex-military? There was even a Spike TV miniseries about a Marine unit that goes into wholesale bank robbery.

Larry M. Robinson
Greenville

As Peters notes, “Sen. John Kerry summed up the views of the left perfectly when he disparaged our troops as too stupid to do anything but sling hamburgers.”

This fits with the Times’ latest calumny debasing the military with its psycho-killer obsession, and it’s easily disproved with the kind of investigative reporting that is quite beyond its “journalists.”

Department of Defense statistics show that 97.5 percent of commissioned officers are college graduates, 29.6 percent of warrant officers are college graduates, and 99.1 percent of enlisted personnel are high school graduates.

The military is clearly a cesspool of proto-killers.

David Smith
London

Once again, the Times shows whose side it is on, and it’s not America’s.
Because there is no bad news to report from Iraq, which is driving the paper crazy, it had to turn its attention to something else – the number of murders committed by troops returning from Iraq.
To the Times, this is a major issue. As Peters points out, the Times actually made the troops look better.
If heads will roll at the Times after its blunder, maybe there will be two good deeds that will come out of this.

Bret Wallach
Hicksville

Peters is always on the mark, but his dismemberment of the Times’ front-page portrait of the new “crazed Iraq vet” was in a class by itself.
What a simple question: How does the murder rate among Iraq veterans compare to their peers?
Don’t expect Hollywood to ask it, either.

William Tucker
Nyack

Instead of taking the Times to task for its false and misleading reporting on the “numerous” murders being committed by current war veterans when they return to the states, The Post should be subtly egging them on.
Unlike the Times’ editorial board, the American public overwhelmingly supports our military.
The more The Paper of Misrecord denigrates and maligns them, the better the odds that some of their disgruntled readers will switch to The Post. It’s simple arithmetic.

Emil Maricondo
Brooklyn

After reading Peters’ “Smearing Soldiers,” I want to thank The Post for exposing and denouncing this trash being put out by the Times.

After also reading Peters’ article about the surge and its success (“The Surge at One,” PostOpinion, Jan. 11), I think I’m going to add NYPost.com to my “favorites” on my computer so I can keep up with all of Peters’ writings.

I’m a lady from a small town in Illinois, but I have a big heart that is full of love and pride for our vets.
Billie Brant
Charleston, Ill.

Our troops are individuals – sons, brothers, daughters, mothers and fathers.
Nothing about America’s ethics is as black as the devil’s heart, which could be said of the Islamist insurgents. They capture people and behead them for TV.
These people have no morals or conscience. They must be swept from the face of the earth because their goal is to rule the world.

Edward F. McGrath

Sayville

Peters points to propaganda in the Times, the newspaper of record, that war is turning our returning troops into murderers at home, but the Times can also be called the newspaper of the “thinking elite.”
We have been forced to trade with the flag in the Mideast since the birth of our republic.
Vice-President Thomas Jefferson was appalled by President John Adams’ decision to pay tribute to Muslims interfering with commerce.

President Jefferson refit the Navy and sent the Marines to the shores of Tripoli.

Those bent on understanding society only on a rational basis, ignoring today’s challenges in the context of history, place us in the most jeopardy.

Ken Nelson

Mechanicsburg, Pa.

“These are outdoors, patriotic people,” a military recruiter told me as I prepared to speak at a Boy Scouts function here. “Young people up here are tough. They hunt, they ice fish, they go to football games in an open stadium in the middle of a blizzard. This used to be a great place to be a recruiter, but not anymore,” he continued.
“What’s happened?” I asked this two-tour veteran of the “global war on terror.”

His reply was blunt — and an indictment of the so-called mainstream media: “The press is killing us. We have parents and high school guidance counselors telling our best prospective recruits that they have too much potential to waste it in the military. Last year, we had to debunk myths about how the war in Iraq was being lost. Now when we go to talk to parents, they ask us about stories they have heard about suicides, drugs — and now murders. There is no ‘good news.’ It’s very discouraging.”

Remember those words: “very discouraging.”

The “murders” my recruiter referred to are those “documented” by The New York Times in a front-page story entitled “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles.” The “Deadly Echoes” piece appeared concurrently with the hunt for a male Marine suspected of killing a fellow female Marine in North Carolina — a story that has been repeated almost hourly on the cable news channels.

The authors of the Times piece claim that they found 121 cases where veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing, or were charged with one, after their return from war. What this amounts to, says the Times, is “a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

The Times reprints one local newspaper headline reading, “Iraq veteran arrested in killing.” The story goes on to fan the flames: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

This collection of sensational headlines is an effective gimmick, but it ignores reality. The homicide rate for 18- to 34-year-old civilians who have never served in the military is actually five times higher than it is for those who are now, or who recently have been in, the armed forces. continued…
Had the Times wanted to make a different point, instead of impugning the U.S. military, they could have done a Google search to find these headlines: “Deputies: Couple commits suicide after foreclosure notice,” from KATU-TV; and “Foreclosure May Have Led to Homicide-Suicide,” from WRTV; and “Lengthy SWAT Standoff Over Foreclosure Ends in Suicide,” from the Houston Chronicle. The New York Times could compile such headlines to dissuade Americans from homeownership.
“Very discouraging” is how the recruiter described the current attack on those who serve in the U.S. armed forces. He’s right; and the recent Times hit piece is just part of a pattern that began to emerge in the so-called mainstream media as the situation on the ground in Iraq began to improve late last year.

By autumn 2007, casualties, attacks on civilians, roadside bombings, assassinations and sectarian violence in Iraq had plummeted. But for the potentates of the press, the lack of bad news from the battlefield didn’t mean that bad news about our military couldn’t be created elsewhere.
From October through December last year, there was a series of print and broadcast “investigative reports” about high rates of suicide, desertion, drug abuse and divorce among members of our military. A Nov. 17 Associated Press story blared: “Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980.”
In fact, the drug abuse and suicide rates for military personnel are considerably lower than that for the same age group in the U.S. population, and the divorce rate in the military remains slightly lower than in the overall population. The desertion rate for the Marines actually has declined since Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite significant improvements on the battlefield in Iraq, the combined effects of this adverse “reporting” have created a more challenging recruiting environment — and made it more difficult for young war veterans to find good jobs once they have completed their service. In December, the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-old veterans was nearly 17 percent — more than three times the rate for non-veteran Americans. It’s clear evidence that the smear has worked.

Oliver North is the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance and author of The Assassins

Well, in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.

The purpose of Sunday’s instantly notorious feature “alerting” the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as “unclean” – as the new lepers who can’t be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who’ve served our country – those who’ve won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor).

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the “sensational” story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder . . . ).

Well, a quick statistics check let the air out of the Times’ bid to make us dread the veteran down the block – who the Times implies has a machine gun under his bathrobe when he steps out front to fetch the morning paper. In fact, the capital-crimes rate ballyhooed by the Gray Lady demonstrates that our returning troops are far less likely to commit such an offense.

Again, the Times’ smear certainly wasn’t an accident. The paper’s staff is highly paid and highly experienced. Its editors know that a serious news story has to put numbers into context. But their sole attempt at context was to note that offenses by former soldiers have ticked up since we went to war.

The Times is trying to make you fear our veterans (Good Lord, if your daughter marries one, she’s bound to be beaten to death!). And to convince you that our military would be a dreadful place for your sons and daughters, a death-machine that would turn them into incurable psychopaths.

To a darkly humorous degree, all this reflects the Freudian terrors leftists feel when confronted with men who don’t have concave chests. But it goes far beyond that.

Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don’t want our pity – they want our respect), the Times’ feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.

The image we all were supposed to take away from that story was of hopelessly damaged, victimized, infected human beings who’ve become outcasts from civilized society. The Times cast our vets as freaks from a slasher flick.

The hard left’s hatred of our military has deteriorated from a political stance into a pathology: The only good soldier is a dead soldier who can be wielded as a statistic (out of context again). Or a deserter who complains bitterly that he didn’t join the Army to fight . . .

At the risk of turning to anecdotal evidence – a technique much-abused by the left – I have to declare that I personally know hundreds of veterans. (Can anyone at the Times head office make that claim?) Not a single one of them has committed a crime worse than exceeding the speed limit on the Interstate.

Not one vet I know is in prison for a crime he or she committed after taking off the uniform. And in nearly 22 years of active service, I encountered only two soldiers who committed violent crimes (no murders).

Contrary to the Times, veterans are consistently among the most upstanding members of their communities. They volunteer. They vote. They take pride in being good neighbors. And those I know have raised their children more successfully than the average liberal household.

But what’s the image that the left, whether the Times or the silly people in Hollywood, presents to us? Vets are nuts. Violently nuts. They kill their neighbors. They kill their own kind. And they’re just waiting for the right moment of madness to kill you.

A longstanding goal of the left, recently invigorated, has been to drive a wedge between our military and our society. The real vet is the neighbor who fixes your kid’s bike (or your computer). But the left’s archetypal vet is the Marine colonel in “American Beauty” who, frustrated in his suppressed gay passions, murders poor Kevin Spacey.

Yes, war is a terrible crucible. Some vets, past and present, do need help. And they deserve the best help our country can give them. But the left-wing fantasy of hordes of psychotics driven mad by drill sergeants and Army chow is just that: a fantasy.

Of course, if the Times responds at all to the storm of protests their insult to our veterans aroused, the editors will try to fudge the numbers in their favor. You just can’t argue with ideologues. They lie and they cheat. And they justify it as being for the greater good of ignorant fools like us.

So let me suggest the best-possible revenge on the veteran-trashing jerks at The New York Times: Instead of fleeing in terror the next time you see a veteran you know, just thank him or her for their service.

And let’s save the leper’s bells for dishonest journalists.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer who has yet to kill any of his neighbors (although they’d better keep their grass cut).

Great post CJ and Thom, great info, thanks!!

January 17, 2008 — Memo to New York Times Public Ed itor Clark Hoyt: Your urgent atten tion is needed on the slanderous 7,000-word front-page article published last Sunday about homicides allegedly committed by US veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.

We say “allegedly,” because the article lumped those merely accused of a homicide with those who’ve already been convicted. But that was the least of the piece’s problems.

As our colleague Ralph Peters so adroitly demonstrated on these pages Tuesday, the article embraced the hoariest of overwrought clich̩s Рthe US combat vet as psychotic killer.

But on what evidence?

None at all.

Indeed, it’s impossible to take issue with the statistics cited by reporters Deborah Sontag and Lisette Alvarez – because their article doesn’t have any.

For most editors, that would be a red flag. Not at the Times, not in a piece that appealed to the editors’ dearest prejudices.

The article, said to be the first of several, reports that there have been 121 homicides involving active-duty or recently discharged Iraq/Afghan combat veterans.

(Need we mention here what the Times thinks of that war – as has long been clear in both its news and opinion pages? Didn’t think so.)

“Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories,” wrote Sontag and Alvarez of this “quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

Lock your doors, America: Here come the killer vets!

And if that didn’t drive the point home, consider this: “This reporting,” the Times warns ominously, “most likely uncovered the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail.”

Really?

As any police reporter knows, homicide statistics are among the most difficult for the authorities to fudge: There are all those pesky bodies to be accounted for. (Maybe Sontag and Alvarez should have asked a police reporter?)

But while 121 are a lot of homicides in absolute terms, what about context?

Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles;

I’m ready for round or PART TWO. Fire the SALVOS AND FIRE OFF THOSE LETTERS TO EDITOR OF THE NY TIMES.
May I please re-print today’s Wall St. Journal’s editorial response to the N.Y.Times drivel:
The ‘Wacko Vet Myth’
January 16, 2008; Page A12
Most journalists consider it bad form to mention the race or ethnicity of a criminal defendant without a compelling reason. But racial and ethnic groups are not the only ones who take offense at such stereotypes. As early as World War I, the American Legion passed a resolution urging reporters “to subordinate whatever slight news value there may be in playing up the ex-service member angle in stories of crime or offense against the peace.” In 2006, Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine bemoaned the “wacko-vet myth.”

We learned of these complaints from an article in Sunday’s New York Times — a front-page piece that perpetuates that very stereotype. “Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans,” the paper explained. A platoon of Times reporters “found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.”

The Times didn’t try to establish a causal relationship between war service and homicide. It didn’t even try to establish a correlation. The 7,000-word article contained no statistics on the size of the veteran population, or on the prevalence of homicide either in the general population or among young men, who are disproportionately represented among active-duty and recently discharged service members.

Various commentators performed their own back-of-the-envelope calculations, including Ralph Peters of the New York Post, who estimates that if the Times figures are accurate, recent war vets are only about one-fifth as likely to be implicated in a homicide as the average 18- to 34-year-old.

The Times acknowledges that this is no scientific study. It says it probably undercounted the number of homicides by war veterans, since it based its count on news reports. It does claim to have found a large increase — 89% — in the number of homicides attributed to servicemen or recent vets since October 2001, compared with the previous six-year period.

But there’s the real rub. The Times is purporting to test a media stereotype by measuring its prevalence in the media. As a Pentagon spokesman put it, that 89% spike could have resulted from “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” Or, to put it more bluntly, the Times hasn’t necessarily proved that the stereotype is true — only that it is a stereotype.